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Lower East Side Tenement Museum

91 Orchard Street
New York, NY
10002

Tel: +1-212-431-0233
Fax: +1-212-431-0402

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Dialogues for Democracy Program

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, along with all Coalition member sites, has designed a program called Dialogues for Democracy. The Dialogues for Democracy help visitors draw connections between the past and the present by using the histories of the sites to inspire new conversations and action on pressing contemporary issues.

Other Programs

Teaching English through History
The Museum’s English program, Familiar Strangers, employs the diaries, letters and memoirs of earlier waves of immigrants to teach English to new arrivals from around the world.

Immigrant Resource Guide
In collaboration with the New York Times and St. Martins Press, the Museum is publishing a multilingual Immigrants Resource Guide. It includes immigrant experiences past and present, answers to the most commonly asked questions and a directory of helpful organizations.

Making History a Shared Community Resource
The Museum founded the Lower East Side Com- munity Preservation Project (LESCPP). This coalition of community leaders, representing churches, libraries, synagogues, and immigrant service organizations, identifies, restores, and preserves local historic sites as a springboard for community dialogue on contemporary issues.

LESCPP’s first project is to preserve and interpret an 1828 “slave gallery” at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church.

Addressing Class Bias
In collaboration with schools and the National Trust, the Museum has developed the nation’s first curriculum about “class.” In Net Worth, students explore 97 Orchard Street and the Trust’s Lyndhurst Mansion as the starting point for a discussion of class bias.

Housing Abuse Action
In collaboration with the NYC Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD), the museum teaches the historic role of immigrant tenants and reformers in improving housing conditions. HPD provides students - many of whom live in substandard housing - with checklists of standards, empowering them to become “Tenement Inspectors” in their own buildings.